A word about Success

Sometimes we are asked an impossible question: "What is your success rate?"

It's an impossible question to answer because we don't - can't - mustn't - presume to define what "success" might look like for our clients. We'd like to say, and certainly believe, that after the event almost all our clients would look back and say our work with them was successful.

But often their own ideas change as their journey progresses: we have clients happily ensconced in a job they'd have to be dynamited out of - yet they'd have killed us if we'd suggested it on Day One.

One client, leaving a 20-year career in a high-pressure business, remarked much later: "Isn't it interesting how it takes at least two years to drain all that stuff through you?" And this was an HR Director, many of whom are the most wedded to the assumption that speed of getting a job equates to competence and service.

Unfortunately it's not true. It's confusing getting a job with choosing a career: it's a frequent and fundamental error. It's why most of our outplacement programmes are not limited by time, since for senior people there is no point - and it may be actively unhelpful - to try to hurry the process.

It's why, at CGS, we run at the client's pace - albeit with a whip in one hand and a rein in the other, to be sure!

A journalist friend put it this way:

"Rod doesn't do advice. Instead, he'll work with you. He'll give you some well-tried tools you need to help yourself. And the results are there to see. Rod's clients tell him that through his process they achieve the outcomes they want. That counts as success."